From the 'Well of the Retching Cure' to a commuter village on the M9 motorway

Administrative Divisions of Paulstown Map

One of the most confusing things about Irish genealogy is the proliferation of different administrative divisions of land and the type of records associated with them. Some areas can be very confusing with the same name used for a townland, civil parish and Roman Catholic parish, with each of them covering a different area of land that overlaps into other administrative divisions.

So, to help with genealogical research, I have a created a GoogleMap that shows all the different administrative divisions in the Paulstown area. When using this map it is best to ignore the place name labels provided by Google. I have used four main sources to create this map: the Kilkenny County Council online planning maps, the Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI) online maps for Ireland, the OSI 6 inch maps from 1837-1842 and the OSI 25 inch maps from 1888-1913.

These boundaries provide some interesting observations and anomalies. The townland of Jordanstown is divided in two by the civil parish boundary between Shankill and Kilmacahill. The townland boundaries along the N10 road, as it passes through the village, show the outline of the road before it was modernised. Part of the civil parish of Kilure (which is in county Carlow and is the neighbouring civil parish to Shankill) is completely surrounded by Kilmacahill civil parish, in county Kilkenny. Just one of the countless anomolies in Ireland.

To get the best accuracy the map below is best viewed using the ‘Satellite’ tab. This will give a view down to the level of boundaries between fields and along roads. I have not included the townlands south of Kilmacahill and Paulstown townlands, in the Kilmacahill civil parish.

The colour codes for the boundaries are:

Blue- Boundary of Townlands

Red- Boundary of Civil Parishes

White- Boundary of County, Barony and Roman Catholic Parish

I have limited the map area to land covered to natural and artificial boundaries formed by:

Areas where satellite pictures have not been taken by Google (north and west)